A conservative radio host who downplayed vaccines on his show is on an…
In recent weeks, calls for vaccine mandates have increasingly been heard: In a column headlined “Stop pleading with anti-vaxxers and start mandating vaccinations,” The Washington Post’s Max Boot implored President Biden to “stop making reasonable appeals to those who will not listen to reason.” Former Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius lamented that “we’re going to tiptoe around mandates,” and she’s “kind of over that.” A coalition of medical professional organizations, including the American Medical Association, has asked for “all health care and long-term care employers to require their employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Meanwhile, there’s a top-down push to get reluctant citizens vaccinated: The White House and the Department of Education partnered with colleges and universities on a “Covid-19 College Vaccine Challenge.” On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to mandate vaccinations for more than 100,000 of its employees. On Thursday, Biden announced that civilian federal workers must be vaccinated or submit to regular coronavirus testing.
But if this rhetoric and these efforts lead to a de facto national vaccine mandate, it will backfire: Americans from all walks of life resist being told what to put into their bodies, and many will resent any politician or institution that makes them get vaccinated, creating a crisis of legitimacy for any government, university or business that forces constituents, students or employees to get vaccinated. Indeed, the president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association has already said, “There will be a lot of pushback” from members of his organization against the federal employee mandate.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about partisan vaccine resistance — according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, 29 percent of Republicans say they won’t get vaccinated, compared to 4 percent of Democrats — but that doesn’t tell the whole story. In mid-June, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, when parents of children ages 12 and older (the youngest group authorized for vaccination) were asked by Kaiser Family if they would get their children vaccinated, 18 percent said they would wait and see, 10 percent said they would if required and 25 percent said “definitely not.” As FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley explains, “Unvaccinated Americans tend to be younger” and “more likely to be a person of color. The situation we’re in is not just because of politics but also because of access to the vaccine and broader skepticism of the health care system.”
I got a breakthrough covid infection. The worst part is the conflicting advice.
As Maya Goldenberg, author of “Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science” argues in a recent blog post, many of the vaccine-hesitant are well-educated, work in the health-care industry and have questions about how effective the vaccines are at stopping transmission, whether they’re safe to take during pregnancy or if they impact fertility.
Not only won’t mandates resolve many citizens’ concerns on these issues, they could lead many to feel that their concerns are being overlooked.
Furthermore, researchers have found that in some cases, vaccine resistance can be an expression of what the New York Times described as an ingrained “moral preference for liberty and individual rights.” Take NFL player Cole Beasley, who defiantly tweeted:
And the more that government flexes its political muscles to urge or enforce vaccine compliance, the greater incentive there is for populist politicians to push back, reinforcing the idea that the fight over vaccines is a fight about individual liberty: Earlier this month, not long after Biden floated the idea of a door-to-door vaccination outreach effort, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) rallied the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying: “Don’t come knocking on my door with your ‘Fauci ouchie.’ You leave us the hell alone” — referencing Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has become, since last year, the public face of the nation’s vaccine response.
Opinions | Vaccine mandates will backfire. People will resist even more.